Employee Busted Driving Vehicle While Home Sick

Hiring a new fleet driver can be risky. As an employer, you entrust the new driver with your company vehicle and assume he will maintain good driving habits and represent your company positively. As one FieldLogix customer recently found, not all new hires are worthy of that trust.

Melanie White of AirEconomics described their situation as such: “We brought on a new technician and provided him with an AirEconomics vehicle to use. We made sure to let him know that we have a tracking system in the vehicle during his orientation. Three days into his employment with us, we found out he used the vehicle the night before until 2 am in the morning. He happened to call in the morning of this discovery to let us know that he was sick and would not be coming in. Upon logging into the FieldLogix system again, we discover that while he was supposed to be home sick, he was actually driving around in our vehicle. He may have cost us a full tank of gas, at least. We called him demanding for him to bring the vehicle in and park it at our office. He never showed up. We again logged into FieldLogix to see where he was and found our vehicle parked a block away from our office. When we approached the vehicle, we found the vehicle with the keys in it and no sign of him. He was no longer a technician for AirEconomics beyond that.”

Because AirEconomics’ outfits its fleet vehicles with FieldLogix’s GPS tracking system, a new employee was busted driving while, supposedly, home sick, and the abandoned work truck was recovered.